Best Meditation Apps to Create a Better Mindset for Yourself & Your Family

The worst part of living a hectic life is that if the cup spills it doesn’t just affect you, but the people around you as well. It’s bad because you already feel stressed out. And what do you get as a result? Even more stress, because you realize your anxiousness negatively affects people around you as well.

I’m pretty familiar with that feeling (let’s be honest, almost everybody is) so I decided to see how meditation can help not just you, but possibly, your loved ones as well. I started digging for some meditation apps that could actually help remedy the problem. After browsing for an entire morning, I found a cute list of supposedly best meditation apps. Naturally, I had to test them out before recommending them. So here are three apps I used for a couple of weeks and ended up being my personal best.

Headspace: Meditation & Sleep

As I later found out, this one is a pretty popular app. But as you know, popular doesn’t always mean it’s great. Luckily, here’s the popularity ended up being as a solid testament to the quality. What I instantly liked about Headspace are the possibilities you’re greeted with when you first start the app. There are various courses for relaxing, overall health, training your mind, etc. Each set is as equally enjoyable, meaning, unlike exercising apps it’s not you’ll like one course over another. Overall, the app is polished up – it looks beautiful and there are next to none flaws to the experience. You start the app, pick what you want to do and start meditating. After using it for a couple of days, I did start feeling a bit calmer and relaxed, which is a great success in my book.Although it’s true it’s a well-polished app, something did happen I didn’t like. One day while meditating the app abruptly shut down which completely ruined my meditation session. You can imagine the irony that the app that’s supposed to bring you calm, ends up bringing quite the opposite. It’s probably due to some minor bug because it happened only once, but I think it’s fair if I mention this and share. Besides that single situation, the experience was great.

Stop, Breathe & Think – Family Meditation

This is an interesting app if you have a family that would want to join your meditation. It’s not like you can’t do it with the other one as well, but what’s great about this one is it has courses made especially for adults, teens and even young kids. You can’t really expect from a 5-year-old to sit at one place for 10 minutes and do absolutely nothing, right? I know I’ve never seen that happen in my whole life. But this app does have well thought out meditation modes for different ages and although I can’t guarantee it will work with your kids, I can appreciate the hard work and trying something different. As far as the adult meditation techniques go, I can say I did enjoy them.

Here’s one complaint that I never thought I’d write about. What I don’t like about this app is that randomly sends notifications when you’re not using it, even when it’s like 11 pm and you’re preparing to go to sleep. Similar to the first one, this is counter-intuitive to what the app is supposed to do. Again, I have to say I’m nitpicking here, but still, why? Be more subtable with notifications people.

Calm – Music for Beginners & Experts

Finally, here’s one that can work both for experts and beginners. This one focuses more on sound than the other two. There’s a huge library of different sounds categorized by audio for meditation, sleep, relaxing and there are even stories you can listen. Everything aims at lowering stress without having to not do absolutely nothing. So instead of trying hard not to think of anything, you’re given a relaxing story that sucks you in or a piece of soothing music that aims at easing your mind. Besides that, the app also comes with simple breathing exercises that can come in handy even when you don’t have your phone at your disposal.

Since I liked the app, I decided to test out the free trial. Everything was great until the trial started nearing to the end. It’s not that I wasn’t considering to maybe pay the monthly subscription, but I did want to cancel the trial first. And yeah, it’s really hard to cancel the trial for some reason. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but it was let’s say an uncomfortable experience. Besides that moment, I did enjoy this app and I’m still using it.

Conclusion

Here you go, these are my top 3 meditation apps I found most useful. Just in case you don’t end up liking any of them, I’ll share the list I used to find the apps in the first place. Who knows, it might help you pick the one that’s right for you.

Finally, there’s not much left to say except that I sincerely hope you’ll manage to relax and achieve a piece of mind if you’re struggling with daily stress. From my experience, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes per day to feel better. And I think a few minutes is more than worth it.